The appearance of green wood chips in garden centres is promising. Now we need compelling messaging about their transformative potential to get them off the shelves.
Is the UK gardening industry – finally – turning greener? Not just a greenwash of pale green, but a deep, meaningful, ecologically sustainable shade of green? It could be.
There’s a promising green blip on gardening’s earth-friendly radar, and this summer I bumped into a bag of the reason for it at a well-known chain garden centre. The bag was plastic, of course, but it contained 40 litres of something with the potential to reinvent the way we garden, by both rethinking and literally revitalising our relationship with soil.
‘Eco Slow-Feeding Ramial Mulch’ might not trip off the tongue, but it’s the commercial marketing pitch of a game-changing approach to soil care that I’ve experimented with and written about for the last decade. Manure heaps are a rare sight here in Eryri’s sheep country, so my initial efforts to feed and build the virgin soil my garden is founded on steered toward using compost (home-made and bought-in local green waste) and fresh seaweed, and growing green manures.
It worked: I gradually improved the soil without using any manure or other animal-derived inputs, which catalysed my garden’s transition from being solely organic to becoming vegan-organic (or veganic for an easier mouthful), where I follow a no-dig approach. Then my entire attitude to building soil, to nurturing its health and to understanding it better, changed when I discovered what I’ve coined ‘green wood chips’; isn’t that easier to say and picture than ‘Eco Slow-Feeding Ramial Mulch’? ‘Chipped branch wood’ or ‘ramial branch wood’ are other descriptors.
‘Ramial’ is derived from the Latin ramus, meaning branch; green wood chips are made from the thinner outer branches, under 7cm in diameter, of deciduous trees and shrubs, bare or in leaf, which have been passed through a shredder. The superpower of green wood chips is that they’re packed with amino acids, enzymes, proteins, sugars and minerals, and contain high concentrations of the main plant foods. Adding them to your soil, where they quickly break down, triggers an explosion of beneficial soil life.
The use of the word ‘mulch’ is also muddling. Eco Crops, which sells Eco Slow-Feeding Ramial Mulch, also offers Eco Ramial Chipped Willow Mulch. Both products can be used as a straight mulch; the goodness in the chips passes to the soil as the mulch breaks down, and they’re more soil-enriching than conifer bark. But their ‘slow-feeding’ product, which is composted down prior to bagging (green, wet and sappy chips wouldn’t travel well to garden retailers; the willow mulch is a drier product), can also be incorporated into soil, or blended into a home-made peat-free potting mix, to add immediate microbial and mycological magic.
If I was trying to build a market for the garden-changing product that green wood chips are, I’d ditch ‘ramial’ and adopt more chipper gardening lingo. ‘Wood Chip Soil Booster’ might sell a clearer message – feel free to tinker with your own take.
Introducing a new concept, let alone an unfamiliar yet ecologically sound, proven and genuinely sustainable product (Eco Crops harvests its chips from fast-growing coppiced UK willow farms) to a broad, arguably unadventurous gardening public is some challenge. Language matters: it must be clear, spike curiosity, grab the imagination and tempt a give-it-a-go attitude. Otherwise the pallet of stacked bags, like the one I took mine from, is destined to gather dust. But there was another reason the bags weren’t selling: the price tag.
My 40-litre bag cost me £8 (which was discounted), but it can be up to £13 for a single bag – a price tag more likely to trigger indifference than curiosity, although the cost falls if you order in bulk (in any event, casual shoppers are more likely to just see expensive mulch). But it’s in garden centres and other retailers that most average gardening folk are going to have their first and possibly only encounter with game-changing green wood chips – rarely do you read about them in gardening media – so the price needs to be right.
Given such ambiguous marketing, it’s hard not to see the potential of these promising products – to not just improve soil but to engage more gardeners in caring for and understanding it – being sadly and easily lost, unless the bags and the sales boards tell a more attention-grabbing, persuasive tale. Asking those with first-hand experience of using green wood chips might have garnered some helpful story advice…
There is another approach that gardening retailers themselves could take – if they were prepared to be more creative and joined-up in supporting ecologically renewable, durable gardening. They could start by telling a more compelling story about the shredders they sell, by moving the narrative from disposal of awkward woody waste to utilising the rich fruits of shredding as an invaluable, multipurpose resource, from weed-beating mulch to soil-boosting manna. Giving garden shredders a green reboot (they’re pretty green anyway, and supremely shareable) could boost sales.
To really join the dots, retailers could sell green wood chip propagation packs during the autumn and winter months, containing ready-to-plant big, dormant hardwood willow cuttings (native osier, Salix viminalis, is easy, fast-growing, beneficial to wildlife and available by mail order). They’re light in weight, easy to store in outdoor sales areas, require minimal packaging and require only modest pricing. They could be supplied with basic instructions, such as not planting close to building foundations, tips on establishment (it’s dead easy; you just stick the cuttings in a hole), and how to eventually shred and use your soil-boosting wood chips. Customers might even be back in a couple of years to buy a shredder.
The beauty of growing your own green wood chips is that they don’t need putting in plastic bags or transporting, don’t need composting first (unless you want them for DIY potting mixes), and can go straight to work on building and invigorating soil, hot from your shredder.
It seems our gardening industry isn’t greening up quite as I’d hoped, although it’s not for want of trying. It just needs to gen up on storytelling, sow curiosity and start talking our lingo.
Words and images © John Walker
Find John on X @earthFgardener